KFC, Nando's, and other top UK fast food chains just scrapped their pledges to stop using "Frankenchickens." Their excuse? The climate. They claim switching to higher-welfare breeds would raise emissions. And it's true — Frankenchickens do emit less. You can’t burn energy moving if you’re too lame to walk. But the difference is tiny. Adopting the full Better Chicken Commitment — including phasing out Frankenchickens — would increase emissions by just 11% (Van Horne et al., 2025). That’s ~0.5 kg CO₂ per chicken — equivalent to about one bite of steak or 30 seconds of flying. On carbon markets, they could have offset this for ~3 pence (4 cents) per chicken. Meanwhile, the animal welfare reforms they abandoned would spare each chicken 100+ hours of “hurtful” and “disabling” pain over their short lives (Welfare Footprint Project, 2022). So either Nando’s, KFC, and the others are terrible at scope-sensitive trade-offs — or this was never really about the climate.